31 Days :: Six Ways to Chronicle a Child’s Growth and Milestones + Calendar Sale

by jessicaturner on October 28, 2011

This is the 28th day in a series: 31 Days of Memory Keeping. Check out all the posts here.

Chronicling your child’s growth is a great form of memory keeping. Here are six easy things I do to chronicle my children’s growth.

Baby’s First Year Calendar - I love these calendars that are customizable for baby’s first year. I am using the Really Woolly Baby – Baby’s First Year Calendar from DaySpring for Adeline. I have it hanging near the changing table so I remember to write on it. I love the sweet design.

This is also my favorite gift to give an expectant or new mom because it is such an easy form of memory keeping. It is sort of like Project Life in calendar form!

UPDATE : HOT SALE – THREE calendars for the price of ONE – DaySpringjust put the Really Woolly calendar on sale for $8.99 (regular price is $12.99) because they LOVE Mom Creative readers.

But it gets better.

DaySpring is also running a promo for buy 2 calendars, get 1 free (if you have 3 calendars in your cart, the lowest priced one will automatically be deducted).

Plus they have a 20% off code available right now (FLPRT20).

That means you can get THREE calendars for less than the price of ONE! (Total for 3 calendars with the two promos is $12.59). I’d go snatch these up and save them for baby gifts. You can also get free shipping on orders of $50 or more and the 20% off code is good on everything in the store.

Baby book - Though I am admittedly not great at filling it out, I like that a baby book encourages me to document monthly milestones. I bought both of my kid’s baby books at Hallmark – they are three ring style, which I love because I can add pages into the book.

Growth charts - Elias has a growth chart hanging in his room. Every once in a while we have him stand next to it to document his growth. He loves seeing how big he has gotten. We don’t have a growth chart yet for Adeline, but I will probably get one from Paper Coterie around her first birthday. My mom still has the growth chart that hung in my room as a child!

Handprints - We have this handprint kit for Elias’s first five years. (In the picture, the plaster is still wet – and his handprint isn’t perfect, but that’s part of the fun – he was NOT in the mood on the morning I decided to do it.) I need to get this for Adeline too. I love seeing his little prints growing!

I also love handprint art (thank you pinterest) and I do various handprint projects with Elias about once a month. I then insert them in my Project Life album. They are often seasonal or something that he is into – last month we made Thing One. Tonight, I am making a canvas like this with the kids footprints for some easy Halloween decor.

Elias is always so tickled by handprint art.

Monthly photos – If you have read this blog for awhile, you know that I take a monthly photo of Adeline each month for her first year – and I did the same for Elias. Here’s a sequence of Adeline’s first four months. You can tell that the images are not perfect and that it is more about getting it documented than about making a big production out of it. (I do plan to color correct the images a bit).

What makes these photos work well is to have a stuffed chinchilla in the shot. It really helps show the baby’s growth. In Adeline’s case, you can see the monkey getting smaller – ha!

Seeing the pictures all side by side is so cool, isn’t it?

Yearly photos – Every year we have a professional take photos of our kids around their birthdays. These photos are priceless for showing their growth. School pictures do the same thing. When I was a child, my mom had 8×10 frames that she would put our school pictures in every year. And each year when we would add the year’s new photos, my sister and I would spread the old photos out in the living room and look at how we had changed.

I hope this inspires you to chronicle your children’s growth. Now go snatch up those DaySpring calendars!

I have enjoyed reading your series – it has inspired me to print some photos and I’d like to have a go making a photo book with a special deal a local store has on.

Baby’s first year – for each of our children I have also taken a monthly photo, but I do just a head & shoulders shot and always use the same background. This doesn’t capture their overall growth, but does allow you to see the way their face changes over the year. I repeat this photo yearly after this – on or near their birthday.